Visions of a Persian Star-gazer
 

HUGH MACDONALD
 

!/■ If "^HERE, were times—perhaps now altogether lost to civ-
I     ilized man—when people were able to gaze upwards

J_L through a perfectly limpid atmosphere and see spread
above them a starry sphere of virtually unclouded beauty. Such
star-gazers were often nomads or peoples of nomadic origins to
whom the configurations of the stars lent both practical and spirit¬
ual direction in an era when science and religion, though not un¬
sophisticated, were yet largely inseparable. In the case of the Arab
peoples, the needs for such direction and spiritual fulfillment sus¬
tained both the science and the mystique of astronomy-astrology
through those periods of Islamic history in which there was offi¬
cial and theological condemnation of such studies—just as the
pleasurable arts of miniature painting and Persian poetry survived
similar theocratic strictures. We must be mindful, though, that
the cause of astronomy-astrology was further bolstered by the an¬
cient zeal with which the Arabs pursued mathematical interests
even prior to the advent of Islam.

It is with these thoughts that we approach a stunning new ac¬
quisition of the Department of Special Collections (see Columns,
May 1968)—an illustrated book of the fixed stars by the renowned
Persian astronomer, Abd-ar-Rahman, who is referred to in many
texts simply as as-Sufi. Columbia's codex is a translation into Per¬
sian from the Arabic original in a copy made in either India or
Persia in the 16th century. It is disbound and missing 6 of its orig¬
inal 133 leaves, but there remain 74 wonderful painted miniatures,
of which 42 are full-page in size. The Persian translation is known
in only a few copies and some of these are merely abridgements.
Columbia's particular copy bears the stamp of the Indian Imperial
Library situated in the city of Burhanpur, once the seat of the Dec-

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